MicroDragon is the first 50-kg satellite developed since 2014 by Vietnam National Satellite Center (VNSC), Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology. Its mission is to observe Vietnamese coastal sea areas to access water quality and locate aquatic creatures in order to support aquaculture. Some important review meetings marking the project milestones have been holding to evaluate development progress of MicroDragon satellite. Among them, Critical Design Review (CDR) was organized from Sept. 20th to Sept. 21st, 2016 at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
Figure 1. Image of MicroDragon satellite
The CDR meeting focuses on reviewing system critical design of MicroDragon satellite and scheduling Structural Thermal Model (STM) Test, Flight Model (FM) functional and environmental tests. Participating in the meeting, there are a representative from VNSC, professors from 5 Universities in Japan, and VNSC students involved in MicroDragon project.
Figure 2. Tohoku University where CDR was held
During the 2-day meeting, development schedule and human resource organization from Sept. 2016 to Sept. 2017 was discussed and approved by the VNSC representative, Japanese professors and VNSC students. Besides, as a main goal of the review, leaders of subsystems including system engineering, payloads, command & data handling, attitude determination and control, structure, thermal, electical power supply, and communication, delivered presentations about their subsystem’s development progresses, detailed design and component-level test results. These presentations received all the participants’ comments of which purposes were to speed up development schedule, as well as guaranteeing development quality of MicroDragon satellite. Particularly, comments of Japanese professors and VNSC representative clarified critical points and solved existing specialized problems.
Figure 3. Group photo of CDR participants
The CDR meeting finalized bus electrical design and scheduled functional tests after CDR. Flight onboard software is under development and to be speeded up with the support of Japanese professors. Structure design will be finalized after reviewing STM vibration test results at the end of 2016.
Development of MicroDragon satellite will be completed in Sept. 2017, and then submitted to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and launched by EPSILON rocket in 2018.
The CDR meeting of MicroDragon project was organized successfully at Tohoku University in Japan. The meeting marked an important development milestone, reviewed, and finalized detailed system design before developing and testing flight model in 2017.
